Havoc Demon Hunter DPS Guide — The War Within (11.1.5)

Havoc is the DPS Demon Hunter specialization, using a mixture of relentless Physical attacks and Fel magic to deal fast-paced damage and move around the battlefield effortlessly.

Its gameplay heavily focuses on a classic build-and-spend resource loop using Fury, that needs to be generated and spent while managing a variety of short, high intensity burst cooldowns. There is a mixture of quick reactions and fast attacks, and also some planning to align buffs for key moments to layer them together. It comes with one of the best mobility toolkits available, and as a Demon Hunter it brings the Chaos Brand debuff to increase your group's magic damage.

Strengths

• Variety of powerful burst cooldowns to deal with most encounter types
• Always provides cleave regardless of talent choice, and Aldrachi Reaver provides extremely strong funnel.
• Incredibly strong mobility tools allowing for instant repositioning
• Strong defense and self-sustain, making it durable
• Access to a number of CC options, group utility and provides Chaos Brand

Weaknesses

• Does not really have talents that allow it to specialize in single-target encounters
• Damage is extremely frontloaded, putting you in danger of pulling threat
• AoE is tied to cooldowns, requiring planning around key moments
• Best builds often pick up a lot of different tools, requiring you to juggle a lot of buff windows

Havoc has a bespoke leveling experience in Mardum before reaching open questing, giving you a lot of core abilities extremely early. Once you get out into the open world it can tear through any situation with its early burst AoE. As it levels up the survival tools along the way make it extremely potent at solo situations As well.

If you plan on playing a Havoc Demon Hunter but have not leveled one yet, you can take a look at our leveling guide for tips:

Havoc comes with a tight core ability package that gives it an easy pick-up-and-play aspect. This is greatly expanded through the talent tree, and build diversity adds a lot of depth. Havoc's main goal is to generate Fury via effects such as Demon Blades and Felblade, and spend it on Chaos Strike and Blade Dance as much as possible. It also has its big cooldown, Metamorphosis, transforming you into your Demon form granting you Haste and empowering these abilities.

Alongside that, it also uses mid-range cooldowns such as Eye Beam to deal high damage and trigger short burst windows, such as Demonic. It aims to slot these in between its Fury management loop to deal heavy burst, so rewards good cooldown planning. Lastly, Fel Rush and Vengeful Retreat provide extremely good mobility, allowing you to reposition throughout the battlefield with ease.

If you have never played Havoc before and are looking to learn the basics of what the spec has access to, we recommend looking through our Spell Summary first, as well as the Easy Mode page linked below too.

If however you are already experienced with the specialization and are looking for details on ideal talent loadouts and optimizing your rotation, use the links below to jump to our pages covering those.

While we always recommend simming yourself for ideal results, we do provide a dedicated Havoc gearing page that lists the Best in Slot items to look out for in the current season of The War Within.

Once you have started to gear, you should also have appropriate consumables, gems, enchants, and more to use with those new items. We have a dedicated page for exactly these linked below, and the stats page that covers our stat priority.